Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: The rumor that the son of former Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid was strangled has been denied. What is it with this war and dead-prince rumors?

Edmond Kehren, a French reservist, sailed home from New York at the start of the war. Around the Strait of Gibraltar he threw a message for his wife and child overboard in a bottle. The bottle was retrieved a few months later in Spain and sent on to New Jersey. Which is a delightful story, and the disturbing imagery generated by the idea of a French kiss in a bottle may never leave my head.

Germany claims the British sunk the cruiser Dresden while it was in neutral waters off Chile.

A Pancho Villa court-martial convicts Gen. Mateo Almanza and his staff and has them executed.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) says Billy Sunday was paid by manufacturers to break unions. “He is coming here [Paterson] to tell you how many glasses of beer you drank and how many cigarettes you smoked, but he will not tell you how many weeks you were out of work, how many times you were docked, how many of you are blacklisted. He will tell you that you are going straight to hell and try to make you forget that you are living in hell on earth right now.”

Italy isn’t just demanding Trento and Trieste in exchange for staying out of the war, but huge swathes of Austria. But Emperor Franz Josef isn’t even willing to give up Trento and Trieste, although his government is still negotiating; it’s willing to give up the two cities in exchange for cash and renunciation of Italian claims on any other territories, some of whose inhabitants are Italian, so that won’t happen. Supposedly, Kaiser Wilhelm has asked the pope to convince the emperor to make a deal.

Aviator Frank Stites dies in a plane crash in the war. Well, in Universal City, California while making a film about the war. I can’t seem to find out what film, but the internet informs me that the Ghost of Frank Stites haunts Universal Studios to this day and has its own Facebook page (don’t bother).

Stites dropped a “bomb” on an unmanned plane which was rigged to explode: